What is celiac disease?

First of all, celiac disease is different from a food allergy. It's an autoimmune disease, and in order to have it, three things must occur: you must have one of the genes for celiac disease, you must have eaten gluten, and something must have happened to trigger your body to start reacting to gluten. I'll get into what exactly gluten is in another post, but basically it is a protein that is found in wheat, barley, rye and sometimes oats. If you have celiac disease and you eat gluten, your body thinks it is some kind of foreign invader and responds by destroying the lining of your small intestine. As you can imagine, this causes all kinds of bad things to happen.

For a much better description of all of the details than I could give you, check out this website: http://www.celiacdiseasecenter.columbia.edu/A_Patients/A01-HOME.htm and go through all of the links on the left side of the page. Dr. Peter Green is one of world's leading experts on the disease and has written an excellent book called "Celiac Disease: A Hidden Epidemic" that I recommend if you are really interested in learning a lot more. However, keep in mind the following very important consideration:

IF YOU THINK YOU MIGHT HAVE CELIAC DISEASE, YOU NEED TO SEE A DOCTOR BEFORE CUTTING GLUTEN OUT OF YOUR DIET. This is very important. I am not a doctor (although I will be in a few years, I still won't be able to give you medical advice over the internet) and a recipe blog is not a substitute for medical tests. In order to be properly tested for celiac disease, you must still have gluten in your diet. If you are not eating gluten, the test results will be meaningless because once you have been off of gluten for long enough, the damage in your body is repaired and the tests won't find it. The reason this is so important is that some other medical conditions can cause similar symptoms, and you need to know if your problem is celiac disease or something else so that you can be properly treated for it. I met someone in an online support group who thought she had celiac disease, so she stopped eating gluten, but after a year she wasn't really improving so she decided to go to her doctor and get tested. She had to eat gluten for about two months so that the tests would be accurate. It turned out she had an intestinal hernia. She was treated for that and now she's fine, but if she had just gone to her doctor in the first place she could have saved herself over a year of being sick needlessly. Some people still need to eat gluten free because they have a wheat allergy, or non-celiac gluten intolerance, or another medical condition that's helped by eating gluten free, the path to finding out why you're sick will be a lot easier if you get tested first before you cut gluten out of your diet.